Writing at the weekend, Sienna Rodgers and Tom Scotson have profiled its second coming. We learn that among its neophyte adherents are Dan Carden, formerly of the Socialist Campaign Group, and now a "left wing" supporter of the project. He's attracted to Blue Labour because of the importance it attaches to community and the place of working class institutions within it, such as trade unions. Jonathan Hinder, the Westminster group's room booking monitor says he wants to see "bold, left-wing economic policies", lower immigration, and an end to "divisive identity politics". His counterpart Jonathan Brash from Hartlepool more or less says the same thing, saying on crime and punishment and immigration he's "right-of-centre". But again, he wants "big government" and more intervention to help working class people.
How have these chaps stood up for our class during this parliament so far? They refrained from rebelling over the child benefit cap, nor could they even bring themselves to sign an Early Day Motion on the subject. No doubt they've sagely nodded along to older people on their doorsteps moaning about immigration. But they were less inclined to hear their views on scrapping the Winter Fuel Allowance. Precisely none of our champions of the working class so much as abstained.
Two of them are not reticent about stirring up division. Hinder, for example, has made his name known as a transphobe. And David Smith, the fourth in the new Blue Labour quartet, got himself in the papers for playing beggar-thy-neighbour politics with Scotland. This is not down to individual foibles, but is a characteristic of Blue Labour behaviour. When its leading light Jon Cruddas was in the Commons, for all his "economic radicalism" he was hardly known as a doughty defender of trade unions or sticking up for working class people. Though apprenticed to him at one point was Morgan McSweeney who, along with Keir Starmer, have done more to gut the Labour Party of working class representation and working class politics than Tony Blair ever managed. The same can be said of Maurice Glasman, the "founder", who had absolutely nothing to say about the economic radicalism of the Corbyn years (or much else for that matter), only to resurface with a 2022 book on Blue Labour that was almost as thin as the ideas it contained.
It doesn't matter how many words Blue Labour has crafted, their record says a great deal more. Glasman was at Trump's inauguration a couple of weeks ago hobbing and nobbing with GOP luminaries. The well-known Twitter troll Paul Embery always had more time for attacking anti-racist, anti-sexist, and environmental initiatives instead of promoting the solidarity you'd have thought would come naturally to a trade union official. The examples are legion. At best, Blue Labour could be described as a manifestation of negative working class politics, but it's worse than that. It's telling that Blue Labour's origin as a semi-coherent body of thought emerged ... from a series of seminars involving academics, politicians, and policy wonks. As relayed in Rowenna Davis's semi-official history, Tangled Up in Blue. Far from being an expression of working class politics, Blue Labour is based on a simulacrum of what it means to be working class. A middle class idea of the lower orders as blunt and bigoted. Something that reflects their own prejudices.
Blue Labour is an effort at trying to construct an identity politics of our class as a subaltern class. It gains ground in elite circles because it has enough truthiness to them, even though the realities of class today are far different from their narrow imaginings. But there's more to it than prejudice. There is the political utility. As a party of the establishment, Labour has to mobilise a loyal constituency for elections. But the danger of being a party whose roots are in the workers' movement is this might go too far and politicise workers as independent political actors conscious and capable of acting in their own interests. Hence one reason why Corbynism had to be shut down - it pushed at the limits of Labourism and its traditional role as the political cap on and manager of the labour movement. Starmerism response to this problem is interpellating its support as "working people", a political fiction they want voters to fit into. A signal they would respond to with a "yes, that's me" but not mobilising them beyond that because any other political content is evacuated. Blue Labour's SW1 caricature of the working class is an effort at the same. It pretends salt-of-the-earth authenticity and radicalism, while appropriating a conservative politics of division to arrest solidarity and hamper the consciousness of collective class interests. It's not for nothing that women, ethnic and sexual minorities are absent from their cynically drawn picture of class. However, the reason why Blue Labour hasn't taken off - yet - is because its crudity if off-putting to other sections of the party, and it's surplus to requirements right now.
That might not always be the case, but there's one thing we can be sure of. The greater Labour invests in a Blue Labour strategy, the less successful they will be and the faster they bury their chances of winning the next election.
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8 comments:
I was entirely unsurprised to read that Johnathan Ashworth was at the forefront of this new push. Apparently a “fuck off” from the electorate has not led him to doubt his career plans made at uni.
So no panic from some Labour MPs after 6 months of achievement by their Government! Seems they are searching for the life rafts. You have to hand it to Keir, Rachel, Wes et al as it usually takes 3 or 4 years for this type of response from 'loyal' MPs but they have managed it in months with their policies, comments and actions.
It's far from clear to me why you think the British working class should support mass immigration, by which I mean the historically unprecedented volumes of the last few decades? This is not to say all immigration is bad, there's an overwhelming case for wanting the most productive and highly skilled immigrants (although it's often a policy choice not to train more of these people domestically), and I am absolutely in favour of cherry picking. Obviously mass immigration is beneficial to capitalists pursuing a low productivity model; it holds down labour costs and avoids need for investment in productivity raising measures. But if you're the British working class and you're competing for jobs, public services and places to live with the lower skilled, lower productivity (less economic or even uneconomic) end of mass immigration, or the place you were born now resembles a third world country because fully integrating very large numbers in a relatively short period of time was never going to happen, I don't see how that is in your interest?
It's also not clear to me why the British working class in aggregate would have a particular interest in overturning the two child benefit cap? I could understand it if such a thing had existed eighty or a hundred years ago, when the British working class had much larger families, and working class women were less embedded in the formal economy. It seems to me the actual British working class would more likely be subsidising the lifting of the cap rather than benefiting from it should it happen. Are class interests and solidarity so stretchy they cover people who are probably not in the same class, and probably don't even have the same interests?
Events may conspire to save him, but already Starmer looks like a dead duck PM. Seems Mrs Brown (McSweeney) thinks he's more of an HR manager than a leader, and they only chose him because their preferred candidate would never have got the members vote.
He appears to have no ideas at all. Yvette Cooper said he stands for "respect and hard work, and making the country work for working people." Which is a bit like motherhood and apple pie. As to HOW to make the country work for those people, he offers not a suggestion. Other than "growth". Which apparently means more flights for the SE.
He is proving to be as talentless as Sunak, and as devoid of principles as Johnson. His economic policy is veering towards the Trussian, so it's quite a trio to emulate.
It is becoming difficult to see much improvement over the Tories, other than slightly more serious demeanours, and a tad less provocation.
'an end to "divisive identity politics"'
Orwell's most famous fictional regime would be proud of how phrases like that one are always, absolutely without fail, used today to signal an intention to throw as much fuel as possible onto the culture wars binfire. Perhaps the human-shaped mistakes who habitually do this should be known collectively as the Ministry of Unity.
Think the issue with Starmer is that he's right-wing in ways that don't appeal to right wingers, and left wing in ways that don't appeal to leftists. But in this sense he is entirely typical of the managerialist wing of the PLP.
I think Blue Labour probably do have a constituency, but that constituency is outside the Labour Party. Then again I think the (tiny) constituency for Continuity Blairism is also outside the Labour Party, but that didn't stop them hijacking it!
Excellent pop at Blue Labour, and very interesting titbit about Maurice Glasman. So if all this was confected "from a series of seminars involving academics, politicians, and policy wonks" do we have any social research that points us to the relationship between class, occupation, education, age and attitudes? Must be free to read as I am only a poor pensioner.
History rhymes once more. When he was Labour Minister, Oswald Mosely, produced the Mosely Manifesto, an economic programme based on Keynesian intervention, nationalisation and economic nationalism, including import controls etc. At the time, it was supported by a range of "Left" Labour MP's, including Nye Bevan, and was praised to the hilt. In its basic outline it was a forerunner of the Alternative Economic Strategy of Tony Benn and others in the 1970's, and 80's.
When Labour rejected the Mosely Memorandum, he left Labour to stablish first the New Party, and then the British Union of Fascists. The Mosely Memorandum was the economic foundation upon which these later organisations rested, much as, indeed, Mussolini in Italy, Pilsudski in Poland, and Hitler in Germany based their programmes on a similar economic nationalism, and Keynesian intervention. Blue Labour has simply trodden this same path, and that it attracts these "Left" elements on the basis of that radical economic nationalism is nothing new or surprising.
In the 1970's, Benn's limited economic radicalism, which amounted, as with the AES in general, to trying to revitalise British late capitalism, via state intervention and investment, inevitably went along with his opposition to the EU. Yet, in terms of actually saving British late capitalism, let alone opening the door to the replacement of capitalism itself, it was the EU that was the solution.
It is not surprising that Mussolini, Hitler and so on, adopted the strategy of Keynesian state intervention, and the planning and regulation that went with it, such as the German National Economic Council, mirrored after the war in similar national economic planning bodies across Europe, including NEDO in Britain, because that reflects the fact that although these National Socialist parties rested upon a petty-bourgeois mass base, to get the footsoldiers they needed, once in power they had to recognise the nature of the economy as dominated by large-scale, monopoly capital, and to defend and pursue its interests, which reside not in the reactionary, petty-bourgeois dream of a return to some golden age of free competition, but in the ever growing role of the state, and of long-term planning and regulation of the economy.
It also involves a continual expansion of the borders of the state, of the creation of large single markets, i.e. of the multinational, rather than nation state. Hence WWI and WWII, and hence the creation of the EU.
Blue Labour seeks to have one without the other, and can have neither. Britain outside the EU is doomed to stagnate, and not be able to generate the resources for any kind of radical economic policy, as is already being seen, with Reeves' plan for growth as the answer already collapsed around her ankles.
Unfortunately, given the approach of Starmer and Reeves, they are likely to try to counter that reality by a closer relation with Trump and the US, whose ideology they seem to share, as does Glasman. A few freebies, access to Trump resorts, the promise of future jobs is probably all that is required judged by the last 6 months. An escape for them personally, but a disaster that will be left for the rest of us.
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